The Cult - Hidden City: Still a force to be reckoned with

Press Association

For their tenth studio album, The Cult have left the experimentalism and art rock of the Nineties and early 2000s behind and revived the soaring choruses and stadium-friendly riffs of their classic early albums.

They’ve teamed up again with producer Bob Rock, who was behind the controls on the band’s biggest commercial success, Sonic Temple.

It’s unlikely Hidden City will match that album’s sales, that time has gone, but it reveals the 50-something rockers have not lost the swagger of old.

Opening tracks Dark Energy and No Love Lost set a blistering pace - the latter ushered in with a classic spectral refrain from guitarist Billy Duffy which sets minds back to early gems such as Rain and She Sells Sanctuary before an army of Duffys form a grunge chorus and singer Ian Astbury soars above it, still in fine voice.

The album does lose its way a little with ballads In Blood and Birds Of Paradise both striving for an epic sound but falling ponderously short.

However, things pick up with G O A T, Duffy’s sinewy guitar writhing like a snake as the band rock out with a stripped back sound that recalls their classic 1987 album, Electric, and Deeply Ordered Chaos where the guitars attack like machine gun salvos.